The White House is pictured on January 19, 2013 in Washington DC. Americans kicked off Barack Obama’s inauguration weekend Saturday with a day of service, with the president and his family volunteering their efforts in Washington. AFP PHOTO/Jewel Samad (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)
Credit: AFP/Getty Images
Learning from its mistakes with the Healthcare.gov debacle, the Obama administration has launched the US Digital Service, a team of technologists that will advise government agencies on their IT projects, as noted by The Washington Post.
Former Google reliability engineer Mikey Dickerson, who played a critical role in fixing Healthcare.gov, will head up the new team.
The USDS, as it’s called, isn’t primarily focused on providing direct engineering support. That’s left for the General Services Administration’s 18F unit. Instead, Dickerson and his team will provide multi-disciplinary consulting work to help agencies think through how to get their user experiences on par with the private sector.
With today’s launch, the USDS has released a Digital Services Playbook, which outlines 13 best practices for government tech, and a TechFAR handbook for teaching officials how to contract agile software development from the private sector.
➤ Delivering a Customer-Focused Government Through Smarter IT [The White House blog]
Featured image credit: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
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